Inside the Nuclear Bunker Where America Preserves Its Movie History

The Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia.

Film Specialist Rich Hincha inspects and repairs film.

Nitrate Film Specialist Larry Smith places a reel back in storage.

Smith displays a reel in the nitrate storage vaults.

CULPEPER, VA - April 30Vintage cameras and reels no longer in operation in the card catalog room of The Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia Thursday April 30, 2015. (Photo by Jared Soares for Wired.com)

Film Preservation Specialist Printer and Inspector Liz Stanley uses a BHP Contact Printer to make a copy of a film reel.

A Film Specialist's desk.

Film negatives on a light table.

The hallway containing storage vaults for nitrate films. Among the films stored is the original film reel of Frankenstein.

Film Specialist Michael Hinton makes notes on a reel after using the Treise machine to process black and white film.

Reels used to preserve video.

Film Specialist Rich Hincha loads a reel in the screening room.

The screening room.

Share

If the film is rare, highly flammable, and was made before 1951, there's a good chance it'll end up on George Willeman's desk. Or more specifically, in one of his vaults. As the Nitrate Film Vault Manager at The Library of Congress' Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, Willeman presides over more than 160,000 reels of combustible cinematic treasure, from the original camera negatives of 1903's The Great Train Robbery to the early holdings of big studios like Columbia, Warner Bros, and Universal. And more barrels keep showing up every week.

Arriving at the Library through a combination of private donations and official purchases, these nitrate films represent a small fraction of its 1.4 million movie, television, and video recordings. Still, they're without a doubt some of the oldest and most important. Hence the 124 cold storage vaults that wind their way down the hallway just outside of Willeman's office. "They kind of remind me of the solitary confinement in Papillon," he says before popping open the door to Columbia Pictures' B-film vault. "Very severe looking."

Jared Soares for WIRED

That severity serves a critical purpose, one that even Steve McQueen would likely approve of. While cellulose nitrate can be an extremely robust long-term storage medium (there's an experimental film from Edison's Laboratory here that dates back to 1891), it does have some unique and undesirable properties. Namely, it explodes. And decays. And catches fire. All with surprisingly little provocation. Also, it doesn't need oxygen to burn (it conveniently supplies its own), can't be put out once it does start burning, and it exudes nitric oxide as it deteriorates, which causes an autocatalytic reaction that hastens decay even more.

To prevent those things from happening, a number of precautions have to be taken. Reels are separated from one another by concrete-infused steel shelving units, vaults are kept at a brisk 39 degrees Fahrenheit with 30 percent relative humidity, and a trio of fire detection systems ensure that if the unthinkable does happen, 200 pounds per square inch of water will rain down on both sides of the vault to (hopefully) prevent other films from going up in flames.

Today, Willeman wants to show me a less distressing kind of fire—one recorded on a piece of nitrate celluloid 105 years ago. The film is part of a collection of 35mm prints the Library recently purchased with its annual budget of $15 million dollars, and represents what Willeman calls "the holy grail of film preservation." As he moves a small magnifying glass over one frame I can see what appears to be a flaming monster rising up out of a vat. The image is from Edison's Frankenstein—a 1910 film put out by Edison Studios. Not only is this the first motion-picture adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it's the only known copy of the film in existence.

The monster, as Willeman explains, is actually a puppet that filmmaker J. Searle Dawley set on fire, filmed, and then ran backwards to make it appear as if he's gradually being built up out of the vat of ooze. And for being over a century old—not to mention spending a lot of that time in a film collector's basement—Edison's Frankenstein seems to be in surprisingly good condition. Still, like some of the other 20,000-30,000 items that arrive here at Packard campus every week, it's about to undergo an intensive preservation process—one that can take years of effort and cost anywhere between $10,000 and $100,000.

To Conserve and Protect

If you're a cinephile with hoarding tendencies, the Packard campus is pretty much heaven on earth. One of the Library's overarching missions is to preserve, in perpetuity, America's memory for future generations. That means everything that shows up at Packard—films, videotapes, manuscripts, posters, screenplays, music, spoken word and radio broadcast recordings, and more recently, videogames—never gets turned away.

That's not easy when you get more stuff than you can process. "We receive in material disproportionate to the staff for which we have to process it," admits Rob Stone, curator for the Moving Image Section. "It's a tough thing. People say 'just stop taking stuff,' but there are things that if we don't take, they get destroyed. I would rather it take 10 years for something to get processed so that somebody in 10 years can see it rather than never," he says.

Jared Soares for WIRED

Walk through the main entrance and you're almost immediately confronted with the realities of this take-everything philosophy. There are shrink-wrapped boxes full of Jerry Lewis' and Ernie Kovacs' private film collections, esoteric civil defense films from the '50s about how to survive a nuclear holocaust by keeping your house and yard clean, and 35mm prints (on polyester stock, not nitrate) of the summer's latest blockbusters. There's even a beautiful 205-seat Art Deco theater capable of projecting nitrate film and modern digital movies.

On the day I visit the campus, Mike Mashon, head of the Library's Moving Image Section, has neatly arranged 106 years' worth of moving image history before me on a small table. This sampler of the Packard holdings includes the original video cassette of Spike Lee's 1983 NYU student master's thesis film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, the first recorded television color broadcast (also the oldest videotape in the collection), as well as the first attempted digital cinema package (basically, a hard drive) sent to the Library to be registered for copyright: Justin Bieber's Never Say Never. (Attempted because the hard drive is encrypted and the Library can't preserve encrypted digital material. Sorry, Biebs).

All of these items get preserved here on the verdant Packard campus. Tucked into the side of Mount Pony, the highest slope (which is not very high) in Culpeper County, VA, Packard comprises four buildings that take up a total of 415,000 square feet. Not that you really notice them walking around: Much of the campus remains underground. That's because from 1968 to 1993 the facility served as the eastern United States' apocalyptic money bunker. The Federal Reserve kept billions of dollars inside this bomb- and radiation-proof bunker in order to kickstart the economy east of the Mississippi should a nuclear attack occur.Thankfully, the reboot money was never needed. After being decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, the facility sat around for a few years before philanthropist David Woodley Packard (son of the Hewlitt-Packard co-founder) swooped in, remodeled it, and gave it to the Library of Congress as a super-fancy gift.

The Politics of Preservation

Today, the Packard campus is home to another kind of national treasure: more than 6 million film, video, audio recordings, as well as their supporting scripts, posters, and photos. Much of this material comes in through the US Copyright Deposit System, which requires that studios mail hard copies of films and television shows directly to the Copyright Office on Capitol Hill. But personal donations are also a big part of the collection here. NBC recently donated 122 reels of their complete coverage of the JFK assassination to the Library. Bob Hope's own personal film collection was so big that it led to the creation of the Bob Hope Gallery at the Library's Thomas Jefferson Building on Capitol Hill.

Deciding what to preserve (and in what order) is another matter. Frequently a very complex one. The National Film Preservation Act (pdf) provides some very general guidance. Every year, the Librarian of Congress (James Billington) names 25 "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" films to the National Film Registry. The films must be at least 10 years old, and are ultimately selected from hundreds of public nominations by the Librarian and the National Film Preservation Board. So far there are 650 titles in NFR, which include everything from 2014's entrants like The Big Lebowski and Luxo Jr. to the President McKinley Inauguration Footage from 1901 and 1912's A Cure for Pokeritis. Not all NFR titles need preservation (and preservation isn't a prerequisite for entry), but for the ones that do, Packard is often their best (and sometimes only) hope.

"We focus on what are known as 'orphan films,' or films not owned by wealthy studios," says Steven Leggett, staff coordinator for the National Film Preservation Board. These independent, silent, short subject, education, and documentary films often don't get a preservation guardian simply because of the way film preservation works here in the US. Because other archives (like MoMA, the George Eastman House, UCLA, and the Academy Film Archive) rely on grant funding, that also means they're essentially forced to preserve titles that will attract that funding. So, basically popular movies with name recognition get preserved. The rest often get ignored.

Mashon puts it this way: "It's a good illustration of the fact that we—alone among most film archives (and certainly those in the US) —are able to devote preservation resources to films with little to no profile."

That's not to say that Packard scrapes the bottom the preservation barrel. As Mashon is quick to point out, they've worked on Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, Suspicion, Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur, Best Picture winners like All Quiet on the Western Front and It Happened One Night, and a slew of National Film Registry titles ranging from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to Yankee Doodle Dandy.

While each of these films presents its own unique preservation challenges, the process inevitably starts on the third floor.

The Many Paths of Preservation

At any given moment, the Packard labs are working on several different titles, all at varying stages of completion. During my visit, this list included Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein; a one-reel sound film called Old Man Trouble; a 1951 commercial for Durkee's Famous Sauce (starring Buster Keaton); and Fred Wiseman's 1967 documentary about the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, Titicut Follies.

For film, there are a few preservation paths a title can take. Some, like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein require a full photo-chemical preservation. This means making entirely new preservation elements from the original (usually badly damaged) camera negative, including a new negative show print. For other films, the Library will preserve a film chemically and then stop at a negative or fine-grain master.

"We won't make a print that can be projected in a theater in those cases," says Mashon. "Instead we will scan that negative or fine-grain master into our system and that digital file then becomes our access copy."

He says this is typically the case for films the Library believes won't have much use in theatrical expedition (Fact: Packard actually has a free loan program for many of its films). Other paths include just scanning nitrate digitally. This is frequently done for 16mm films, which aren't preserved on film anymore.

Regardless of the final outcome, almost all films marked for preservation first get cleaned in a bath of perchloroethylene—the same fluid used in dry cleaning—to temporarily fill in the scratches. They then get pored over for days (sometimes weeks) by an inspector who places the entire film on a bench and proceeds to go through it frame by frame to fix every little rip and tear with tape, exacto knives, sprockets, and the splices.

"This is part that never gets the big writeups," says Stone, "but if this doesn't happen, nothing else does either. It's the unsung portion of the whole project."

The film heads to a timing suite next, where it's color corrected, and is then subject to various other stages, including being scanned, reprinted, and processed by a unique mix of bleeding edge and archaic machines.

All told, the preservation process can take anywhere from a few months to 10 years—like it did with All Quiet on the Western Front.

Jared Soares for WIRED

Videotape preservation is a different beast, and often a much more straightforward and automated one. This becomes clear the moment you enter the Packard video room. Lined with every tape playing machine known to man—including one-inch machines, Digibeta, Betamax, DVCAM, and Hi8—this is where it all comes to be digitized. I can see an episode of Judge Hatchett playing on a small screen above one of these machines, while four SAMMA robots in the corner gorge themselves on ¾-inch and VHS tapes. The latter automated system runs all the time and has already digitized well over 500,000 television and video items.

For videotape in particular, a timely digitization strategy is key: Many of the formats from the '70s and '80s are already starting to decay, as is evidenced by the piles and piles of boxes filled with completed tapes in the center of the room. "With ¾-inch and VHS tape, it's life expectancy is at its end," says Stone. "Some of this stuff doesn't play already, so it's basically a non viable format and there's no point in putting it back on some shelf. In another couple years, it's just going to be a lump of plastic."

Ones and Zeros

Back on the first floor, Mashon opens the door to a buzzing server room. This is where all the JPEG 2000 and MPEG-4 files being created from videotapes upstairs will ultimately get delivered and digested. The Library currently holds 8 petabytes (that's 8 million gigabytes) of cultural history and is always adding more.

"Everything being digitized today will first be pushed to an embargo space, and overnight, delivered to these one- and five-terabyte tapes," Mashon says, as we watch a twitchy robotic arm inside a server add and remove hard drives.

This also happens to be the main access point to the reading room on Capitol Hill, and is connected via 75 miles of fiber optic cable directly to DC. When a researcher goes to a reading room, they're able see whether a given videotape has been digitized or if there's a digital surrogate for whatever audio or video they're looking for. If they want to listen to or watch it, they're also able to find out whether that file is immediately available online.

Mashon says most of the audio files the Library has digitized are immediately available because they're so small. Video files are larger so Packard uses a cache system. That's actually what the busy robotic arm is up to—grabbing various tapes where quicktime files reside, moving them into a drive, and sending the file over to the spinning disk server. Once there, it travels through the fiber optic cable and lands in a cache up there where the researcher alerted it arrival.

Total wait time? Three minutes.

"I still can't believe any of this actually works as well as it does," says Mashon.